Dr. Elizabeth “Liz” Harrelson Magill

Bio

Liz Harrelson Magill earned her B.A. (2008) in History from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and her M.A. (2011) in Teaching from the University of California, Davis. She served for 15 years in public schools in California and Texas, first as a classroom teacher and later as an instructional coach. She earned her Ph.D. (2025) in Curriculum and Teaching with an emphasis in Social Studies Education. In the fall of 2025, Liz will join the Baylor faculty as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Teacher Preparation in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.

Dissertation

Problematizing the Present and Possibilizing the Future: Designing a Critical Historiography ‘History of the Present’ Framework for Social Studies Education

Abstract

This dissertation studied the design and implementation of a ‘history of the present’ curricular framework for critical historical analysis in social studies classrooms using a Design-Based Research (DBR) methodology with a Constructivist Grounded Theory approach and an embedded multiple case study. By drawing on various approaches to critical historiography, this framework offers history teachers suggestions to critically (re)consider how they approach Centering, Sourcing, Scaling, and Narrativizing within their curriculum and engage students in history as an interpretive field. Approaching history curriculum through historiography is intended to support teachers (and students) in interrogating and problematizing historical and contemporary antagonisms to develop a potentially transformative possibilizing stance toward future civic action. This study includes findings from the development of this curricular framework and its initial implementation in K-12 classrooms by a design team of veteran social studies educators and has significant implications for teacher education and social studies classrooms.

What Faculty Say

 Taken together, the phases of the project demonstrate the value of Liz’s approach to studying history/social studies education from a structural — even infrastructural — perspective. Rather than isolating skills to be taught or content to be covered, she reframes history/social studies as a site for investigating the dynamic ways that historical knowledge is mediated by institutional norms and disciplinary practices. Implicit in this reframing is the idea that alternate mediations might open space for broader forms of historical understanding which can, in Liz’s term, “possibilize” new modes of civic learning in classrooms. Crucially, Liz is clear that teachers have an important role to play in cultivating such modes of instruction. Her masterful use of design-based research — a methodology that places equal weight on theory and practice — offers the field a powerful example of how future scholarship might, similarly, position educators as creators, not just implementors, of disciplinary knowledge.